In the semiconductor industry, integrated circuit (IC) reverse engineering (RE) has been an effective technique to obtain insightful information. Reverse engineering procedure includes de-capsulation, cross section analysis, de-layering, circuit extraction and final netlist conversion. The package of IC is etched off in a corrosive acid solution first. The cross section of the manufacturing process is analyzed using a special machine tool to determine the thickness of each process layer. Then each layer is accurately stripped off one by one using etching or polishing. The devices dimension and the interconnection can be obtained and the associated circuitry can be extracted accordingly. The devices include resistor, capacitor, transistors, diodes and other components. The interconnection wires are numbered and annotated; finally a netlist can be extracted and converted to reversed circuit diagram or schematic.
Integrated circuit (IC) reverse engineering (RE) is particularly more straightforward on analog circuitry due to the fact that the device dimensions in analog circuit are larger, the total number of devices is smaller and the interconnection is less complicated compared to the digital circuit. Through reverse engineering (RE) process, integrated circuit (IC) can be copied or cloned by the competitors. Counterfeit IC has been a major problem in the IC industry because of the reliability and security issues. The counterfeit IC on aerospace and military sectors is especially a major concern.